Michael Neumann


2021

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“It seemed like an annoying woman”: On the Perception and Ethical Considerations of Affective Language in Text-Based Conversational Agents
Lindsey Vanderlyn | Gianna Weber | Michael Neumann | Dirk Väth | Sarina Meyer | Ngoc Thang Vu
Proceedings of the 25th Conference on Computational Natural Language Learning

Previous research has found that task-oriented conversational agents are perceived more positively by users when they provide information in an empathetic manner compared to a plain, emotionless information exchange. However, users’ perception and ethical considerations related to a dialog systems’ response language style have received comparatively little attention in the field of human-computer interaction. To bridge this gap, we explored these ethical implications through a scenario-based user study. 127 participants interacted with one of three variants of an affective, task-oriented conversational agent, each variant providing responses in a different language style. After the interaction, participants filled out a survey about their feelings during the experiment and their perception of various aspects of the chatbot. Based on statistical and qualitative analysis of the responses, we found language style played an important role in how human-like participants perceived a dialog agent as well as how likable. Language style also had a direct effect on how users perceived the use of personal pronouns ‘I’ and ‘You’ and how they projected gender onto the chatbot. Finally, we identify and discuss ethical implications. In particular we focus on what factors/stereotypes influenced participants’ impressions of gender, and what trade-offs a more human-like chatbot brings.

2020

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ADVISER: A Toolkit for Developing Multi-modal, Multi-domain and Socially-engaged Conversational Agents
Chia-Yu Li | Daniel Ortega | Dirk Väth | Florian Lux | Lindsey Vanderlyn | Maximilian Schmidt | Michael Neumann | Moritz Völkel | Pavel Denisov | Sabrina Jenne | Zorica Kacarevic | Ngoc Thang Vu
Proceedings of the 58th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics: System Demonstrations

We present ADVISER - an open-source, multi-domain dialog system toolkit that enables the development of multi-modal (incorporating speech, text and vision), socially-engaged (e.g. emotion recognition, engagement level prediction and backchanneling) conversational agents. The final Python-based implementation of our toolkit is flexible, easy to use, and easy to extend not only for technically experienced users, such as machine learning researchers, but also for less technically experienced users, such as linguists or cognitive scientists, thereby providing a flexible platform for collaborative research.

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On the Utility of Audiovisual Dialog Technologies and Signal Analytics for Real-time Remote Monitoring of Depression Biomarkers
Michael Neumann | Oliver Roessler | David Suendermann-Oeft | Vikram Ramanarayanan
Proceedings of the First Workshop on Natural Language Processing for Medical Conversations

We investigate the utility of audiovisual dialog systems combined with speech and video analytics for real-time remote monitoring of depression at scale in uncontrolled environment settings. We collected audiovisual conversational data from participants who interacted with a cloud-based multimodal dialog system, and automatically extracted a large set of speech and vision metrics based on the rich existing literature of laboratory studies. We report on the efficacy of various audio and video metrics in differentiating people with mild, moderate and severe depression, and discuss the implications of these results for the deployment of such technologies in real-world neurological diagnosis and monitoring applications.